Notes

Residual editorial notes

56 editorial note entries had no resolved in-text occurrence and remain here so no source note definition is discarded.

[75] On the struggle against the Weitlingians in the League of the Just, particularly in its Paris communities, see Note 70.— 56

[103] Droit d'aubaine (the right of escheat)—a feudal custom widespread in France and other countries during the Middle Ages, according to which the property of aliens dying without heirs reverted to the crown.—71

[121] Weitling was in Brussels with intervals from February to December 1846, when he left for France and later to the USA.— 87

[131] At that time the Verlagsbuchhandlung zu Belle-Vue was owned by Johann Marmor and August Schmid. It is impossible to establish which of the two Engels means. In December 1846 the firm moved to Constance.

[133] The Order of the Dannebrog (Order of the Danish State Banner

[134] Engels' report to the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee has not been found.—94

[148] The reference is to the rescripts by Frederick William IV of 3 February 1847 convening the United Diet — a united assembly of the eight provincial diets. The United Diet as well as the provincial diets consisted of representatives of the estates: the curia of high aristocracy and the curia of the other three estates (nobility, representatives of the towns and the peasantry). Its powers were limited to authorising new taxes and loans, to voice without vote during the discussion of Bills, and to the right to present petitions to the King. The United Diet opened on 11 April 1847, but it was dissolved as early as June because the majority refused to vote a new loan.—112

[153] -phe reference is to a cartoon by Engels of Frederick William IV ot Prussia delivering the speech from the throne at the opening of the United Diet in Berlin on 11 April 1847 (see present edition, Vol. 6, p. 67). This cartoon was published as a special supplement to the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung of 6 May 1847.—117 ,54 The reference is to the congress of the League of the Just at which, as agreed between the League leaders in London (H. Bauer, J. Moll, K. Schapper) and Marx and Engels early in 1847, the League was to be reorganised. The congress was held between 2 and 9 June 1847. Engels represented the Paris communities, and Wilhelm Wolff, briefed by Marx, was a delegate of the Brussels communists. Engels' active participation in the work of the congress affected the course and the results of its proceedings. The League was renamed the Communist League, the old motto of the League of the Just 'All men are brothers' was replaced by a new, Marxist one: 'Working Men of All Countries, Unite!' The congress expelled the Weitlingians from the League. The last sitting on 9 June approved the draft programme and the draft Rules of the League, which had

[155a] This letter was first published in English abridged in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.—119

[160] The text of Engels' speech at the democratic banquet on 27 September 1847 is not extant. The recorded speeches of some speakers were published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, No. 80, 7 October 1847.—124

[170] The Prussian United Diet (see Note 148) was dissolved in June 1847.

[171] Engels' first article in La Réforme, 'The Commercial Crisis in England.—The Chartist Movement.— Ireland' (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 307-09), appeared as early as 26 October 1847. After that the newspaper regularly carried his articles, or summaries of The Northern Star reports on the Chartist movement which he translated into French. As a rule they were published under the headings 'Mouvement chartiste' and 'Agitation chartiste' and introduced by the editorial 'On nous écrit de Londres'. Engels contributed to La Réforme till January 1848. Though Engels' views differed from those of the newspaper's editors (especially Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin), his articles on the Chartist movement to some extent helped to overcome the national exclusiveness of La Réforme and exerted a revolutionary influence on its readers — the French workers and the radical middle classes.—135

[183] The Lille Banquet took place on 7 November 1847 during the campaign for an election reform in France which revealed the extremely anti-democratic stand of the liberal opposition to the July monarchy and of the moderate republicans of the National party (see Engels' 'Split in the Camp.—The Réforme and the National.—March of Democracy', present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 385-87).—144

[200] Marx's notes on Wilhelm Wolff's arrest on 27 February 1848, his maltreatment by the police and prison authorities and his expulsion from Belgium on

[209] On 24 February 1848 the people of Paris revolted, overthrew the monarchy and formed a Provisional Government, with the party of the National in the majority. Under pressure from the armed masses, however, the bourgeois republicans were compelled to include in the government four ministers from the list compiled by La Réforme, among them Louis Blanc and a worker Albert, a leader of secret republican societies and participant in the street fighting. On 17 March there was a 100,000-strong demonstration of Paris workers demanding postponement of the elections to the Constituent Assembly (see Note 214).—166

[210] The reference is to the organisation of a legion of German refugees to march into Germany (see Note 205).—166

[215] About 6 April 1848 Marx and Engels returned to Germany from emigration to take part in the revolution that was developing there. On their way to Cologne, the centre of the Rhine Province — the most economically developed region in Germany — which they chose as the place for the planned publication of a revolutionary newspaper, they made a stop at Mainz on 8 April. Here they discussed with the local communists (Karl Wallau who had arrived from Paris earlier, Adolf CIuss and others) the plan of actions to prepare for the creation of a mass party of the German proletariat, with the Communist League as its nucleus. Marx and Engels arrived at Cologne about 11 April. There is no information about the letters which Marx and Engels promised to write to Cabet from Germany.—170

[241] The Code pénal was adopted in France in 1810 and introduced into the regions of West and South-West Germany conquered by the French. It remained in force in the Rhine Province even after its incorporation into Prussia in 1815.—181

[243] Marx probably made the acquaintance of Eduard von Müller-Tellering during his stay in Vienna in August and September 1848. In October and November the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published a number of articles marked Q which were sent by E. von Müller-Tellering from Vienna. They described the situation in the city after the suppression of the popular rising in October.—

[247] On the Code pénal see Note 241. The reference is to 'Livre troisième. Titre II. Chapitre I. Section VII. 2. Calomnies....'—184

[311] Engels' letter to Dronke has not been found.—233

[317] Marx's intention to reply to Lüning's criticism remained unfulfilled. However, in a statement to the editor of the Neue Deutsche Zeitung (published on 4 July 1850) Marx and Engels protested against Lüning's attempts to distort their views on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the role of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the mouthpiece of the working class.—238

[333] Xhe leaders of the refugee organisations listed signed this document. Among them were in particular the organisation of the French Blanquist refugees— Société des proscrits démocrates socialistes (see Note 313), the London German Workers' Educational Society and the Social-Democratic Refugee Committee (see Note 292). The last two fell after the split in the Communist League under the influence of the Willich-Schapper separatist group. Subsequently, in their satirical pamphlet The Great Men of the Exile, Marx and Engels noted that this group was formed from the lower strata of the emigrants and took part in the squabbles among the political refugees. They also made fun of its Fanon-Caperon manifesto, as the conservative press called it (see present edition, Vol. 11, p. 294).—247

[337] Xhe German translation of The Poverty of Philosophy was not published during Marx's lifetime. It appeared only in 1885.—252

[360] Papal aggression here means Pope Pius IX's interference in Anglican Church matters. On 30 September 1850 the Pope issued a bull establishing several Catholic bishoprics in England and appointing Nicholas Wiseman Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal. In reply to this, the Whig Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, carried a bill through Parliament in 1851 forbidding any clergyman not belonging to the Anglican Church to assume the title of bishop. The bill in fact remained a dead letter.—279

[367] The letter Engels intended to send to Harney on 14 February 1851 has not been found. ' On Engels' planned articles, see Note 352.—289

[382] Early in March 1851 Engels went to London for a few days to improve relations with the Chartists which deteriorated after Conrad Schramm and Wilhelm Pieper had been man-handled at the 'banquet of the equals' (see Note 374). Simultaneously, Marx and Engels took steps to expose Louis Blanc, Willich, Schapper and other organisers of the banquet. By that time it had transpired that the latter had deliberately kept secret the text of the toast sent by Auguste Blanqui from the Belle-Isle prison, in which he exposed Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and other members of the Provisional Government of the French Republic as traitors to the revolution. However, the text of the toast was published in La Patrie (No. 58, 27 February 1851) and other newspapers. Marx and Engels translated it into German and English. The German version with a short preface written by them was sent to Cologne and printed in leaflet form, giving Berne as the place of publication (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 537-39). During his stay in London, on 5 March, Engels apparently wrote a letter to the editor of The Times refuting a false declaration of Louis Blanc, published in that day's issue of the paper, that Blanqui's toast was never received by the organisers of the 'banquet of the equals'. Engels enclosed the English translation of Blanqui's toast for publication in The Times. But neither the letter nor the translation was published.—312, 381 20 December 1808 to 20 February 1809. The city withstood the first siege but fell after resisting the second heroically for two months. Engels' remark about the second siege of Saragossa is his own interpretation of an episode described by W.F.P. Napier in his History of the War in the Peninsula..., Vol. II, London, 1832, p. 51.—320 22 March 1851 (see this volume, p. 321). Later Marx and Engels described in detail in The Great Men of the Exile how the attempts to keep Blanqui's toast secret had been exposed. They also included in the pamphlet a passage from La Patrie, No. 71 of 12 March 1851 (see present edition. Vol. 11, p. 296) which Marx quoted in his letter of 17 March.— 319

[409] A reference to Notes to the People (at first the title was intended to be Poems and Notes to the People)—the Chartist weekly published in London from 1851 to 1852 and edited by Ernest Jones. Since Harney had then drawn closer to the petty-bourgeois democrats, the publication of this periodical — the mouthpiece of the revolutionary proletarian wing of the Chartists — assumed exceptional importance.— 346

[410] Despite this conjecture Freiligrath moved from Cologne to London in the second half of May 1851 (see this volume, pp. 355, 359). Of the other members of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editorial board (not counting Heinrich Bürgers, who was only so in name), Marx and Ferdinand Wolff were already in London; Wilhelm Wolff and Ernst Dronke were expected and Engels planned to go to London in the second half of May, and as emerges from his letters he did arrive there at the end of the month (see this volume, pp. 365, 373). Georg Weerth, then in England, also intended to go to London but did not do so until July.—346, 361, 366

[411] Engels suggests that Wellington, a supporter of the Corn Laws (see Note 270), was compelled, as a minister without portfolio in Peel's Government, to promote their repeal in 1846. Engels compares Wellington's defeat with that of the Roman legions in the Caudine pass during the second Samnite war in 321 B.C. The Romans were compelled to pass under the yoke which was the greatest disgrace for a defeated army. Hence the expression 'to pass under the Caudine yoke', meaning to undergo extreme humiliation.—347

[424] Wasserpolackei—a name denoting Silesia, and derived from Wasserpolacken— original name of the Oder ferrymen who were mainly natives of Upper Silesia; subsequently it became widespread in Germany as a nickname for Silesian Poles.—362

[4 2 6] Below Engels analyses German policy towards Poland not in an abstract way but from a definite perspective which might have opened up if a revolutionary democratic movement had taken shape and prevailed in Germany, and a people's revolution against tsarism had simultaneously developed in Russia. It is clear from the letter that Engels considered the political line he recommends here to be appropriate only on condition that the national movement in Poland proper did not go beyond the limits of landowners' (szlachta) demands and, as had often happened in the past, ignored the task of emancipating the peasantry from the feudal yoke. This letter therefore reflects the striving of Marx and Engels to consider the nationalities question from the concrete historical standpoint and to link its solution with the general interests of the revolutionary movement. When, some years later, Marx and Engels realised that the situation in Central and Eastern Europe had not changed and that counter-revolutionary regimes continued to reign supreme in Germany and Russia, whereas in the Polish national movement there was a continual strengthening of the influence of the revolutionary-democratic elements which had played a prominent part in the 1863-64 uprising, they were as Lenin put it 'treating the Polish movement with the most profound and ardent sympathy' (V. I. Lenin, (Collected Works, Vol. 20, p. 436).—363

[429] Marx's letters to Daniels mentioned here have not been found.

[432] Documents compromising Heinrich Bürgers were found on them.

[448] This letter was published in English for the first time with abridgments in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence. 1846-1895, London, 1934, and in full in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.— 392

[451] Friedrich Lessner was arrested in his tailor's shop in Mainz on 18 June 1851, and made an abortive attempt to escape. While searching his flat the police discovered a large library of communist literature including such books as the Manifesto of the Communist Party, 'Demands of the Communist Party in Germany' and the Rules of the workers' educational societies in London, Cologne, Mainz. Lessner was detained in the Mainz prison till July 1852, when he was transferred to Cologne and soon included in the group of the accused in the Cologne communist trial.— 399

[457] On the Baden-Palatinate military campaign in the summer of 1849 and Engels' participation in it see notes 264 and 265.—406

[462] An allusion to an episode in the struggle between the plebeians and patricians in Ancient Rome described by Livy in his Ab urbe condita libri. Tradition has it that Menenius Agrippa persuaded the plebeians who had rebelled and withdrawn to the Mons Sacer in 494 B.C. to submit by telling them the fable about the other parts of the human body revolting against the stomach because, they said, it consumed food and did no work, but afterwards realising that they could not exist without it.—417

[465] At Marx's request Engels wrote in thirteen months (from August 1851 to September 1852) a series of 19 articles about the 1848-49 German revolution— Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany—for the New-York Daily Tribune (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 3-96). Engels used a file of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the main source apart from some additional material given to him by Marx, whom he constantly consulted. Marx read all the articles before mailing them to the newspaper. The series of articles, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, was printed in the New-York Daily Tribune from 25 October 1851 to 23 October 1852 over the signature of Karl Marx, the paper's official correspondent. Only in 1913, when the correspondence of Marx and Engels was published, did it become known that this work was written by Engels.—425

[466] Marx sent this document to the German journalist Hermann Ebner, apparently through Freiligrath. A copy with the beginning and the end missing and written in an unknown hand is extant. Ebner, it transpired later, was a secret agent of the Austrian police to whom he delivered material emanating from Marx, including this letter and that of 2 December 1851 published below, the original of which has survived but with the beginning missing (see this volume, pp. 499-503). Both documents found their way, via the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, into the Austrian state archives where they were discovered in the mid-1950s. In his letter to Ebner of 2 December 1851 Marx called this document a 'communication' and in fact in some passages it is more like an article than a private letter. Marx chose this form purposely. Having no idea of Ebner's spying activities he hoped to use the latter's journalistic connections to have published in the German press documents revealing the intrigues of the German and other petty-bourgeois emigrants, refuting their slander of the proletarian revolutionaries. The letters to Ebner, especially the first one, were therefore written so as to form parts of articles for eventual publication. For Marx himself these letters were the first draft of The Great Men of the Exile which he later wrote together with Engels; in some places the texts coincide. The extant part of the letter has no date. The approximate date of writing has been established by the mention made in the letter of the emigrants' meetings in London on 8 and 15 August 1851 but not of the third meeting, which took place on 22 August and about which Marx wrote to Engels on 25 August 1851 (see this volume, pp. 440-42).—426

[467] An allusion to the former deputies to the Prussian National Assembly convened in Berlin during the revolution in May 1848 to draft a constitution by 'agreement with the Crown'. The Prussian liberal bourgeoisie and the moderate democrats used the 'theory of agreement' in an attempt to justify their policy of compromise during the revolution.—426, 437, 446

[473] A reference to an emigrant organisation — the German Agitation Club — set up in London in August 1851 by Ruge, Fickler, Tausenau and others to counter the Emigration Club (see Note 455) directed by Kinkel and his followers.—439, 47 ' At the end of August 1851 German newspapers reported that the editor of the Kölnische Zeitung, Brüggemann, had been deported from Cologne for opposition articles published in his newspaper. But these reports, based on rumours, turned out to be false.—451

[486] An allusion to Dronke's letter to Marx written from Geneva in August 1851 and sent by Marx to Engels on 13 September same year (see this volume, p. 459). Among other things Dronke wrote about his duel with a Russian refugee, the journalist N. I. Sazonov, his plans to move to Piedmont because the Swiss authorities wanted to expel him from the country, and his intention to get certain sums of money from his debtors in Hamburg with the help of Weerth, who was there at the time. As is evident from Marx's letters to Weydemeyer of 11 September and to Engels of 13 December 1851 and also from this particular letter of Engels, Marx intended to reply to Dronke jointly with Engels. But it is not known whether he did so. In mid-October 1851 Marx received news that Dronke intended going to London (see this volume, p. 481), but he did not arrive there until April 1852.—459, 482

[496] Dronke's arrival in London from Switzerland was delayed till the end of April 1852.—481

[501] Apparently the reference is to the publication of Gesammelte Aufsätze von Karl Marx (see Note 347) started by Hermann Becker in Cologne and interrupted by his arrest. The first issues were to contain Marx's articles from the Rheinische Zeitung.—489

[503] Despite a temporary break with Harney in whose journal The Friend of the People Engels intended at one time to publish a series of articles criticising the petty-bourgeois emigrants and the Willich-Schapper sectarian adventurist group (see Note 352), he did not give up the idea of denouncing in the press the pseudo-revolutionary illusions and voluntarism of the petty-bourgeois emigrants. At the end of November and beginning of December 1851, Engels was 22-1543 520 working on a satirical essay, one of the main characters of which was to be Karl Schapper. It occurred to Marx to have this work published in the USA, in Die Revolution, a weekly planned by Weydemeyer, who had moved to New York by that time. But Marx and Engels were busy writing other works until the spring of 1852 and the publication of Die Revolution was soon discontinued. By that time the differences between Willich and Schapper had become apparent; the latter was disillusioned with sectarianism and wanted to be reconciled with Marx. So when in May-June 1852 Marx and Engels returned to the subject and started writing The Great Men of the Exile (see present edition, Vol. 11), they thought it inexpedient to give a special characterisation of Schapper and concentrated their criticism on Kinkel, Rüge, Heinzen, Struve, Willich and others.—492, 498, 516 5 , 3 On 2 November 1851 a meeting was held at Copenhagen House (Copenhagen Fields) in London to mark Kossuth's arrival (in October 1851) in England. The reformist Thornton Hunt, chairman of the Chartist committee responsible for organising the meeting, tried to prevent O'Connor from attending on the pretext that he was insane. This aroused violent protests on the part of the Chartists and O'Connor was admitted to the meeting. To justify himself Hunt made a demagogic declaration in The Northern Star on 29 November describing himself as a zealous defender of people's interests and calling himself a

[518] An allusion to the fact that during the coup d'état some of

[527] This refers to Joseph Weydemeyer's intention to publish a communist weekly Die Revolution in New York. Marx and Engels agreed to contribute regularly and intended to get some of their party friends to work for it. Weydemeyer managed to produce only two issues in January 1852, following which publication ceased for lack of funds. In May and June 1852 with the help of Adolph Cluss, Weydemeyer published two more issues of the 'non-periodic journal' Die Revolution; the first issue carried K. Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, the second Freiligrath's poems against Kinkel.—516

[529] The reference is to material intended for Joseph Weydemeyer's Die Revolution (see Note 527). Engels wrote four articles on England for it in December 1851-January 1852; only two, written at the end of January 1852 (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 198-209), reached Weydemeyer; the other two got lost on the way. Even the two which reached Weydemeyer were not published in Die Revolution, since it had ceased publication.—518

[531] In the first issue of Die Revolution Weydemeyer announced Marx's work on Proudhon. But since publication of the weekly was discontinued and there were no other possibilities for publishing the work, Marx did not write it. Other plans connected with the weekly as set forth at the beginning of the letter were not carried out either. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte which Marx finished only in March 1852 exceeded the limits of a mere article. Engels sent Weydemeyer articles on England and not on Prussia; some of them got lost on the way, some arrived too late (see Note 529). The two issues of Die Revolution carried excerpts from Marx's and Engels' 'Review, May to October 1850' published earlier in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue, No. 5-6, and (in issue No. 2) part of Chapter Two of the Manifesto of the Communist Party — 519

[532] This refers to the change in the place and time of the meetings of the London district of the Communist League which Marx above calls the 'synagogue' partly jokingly, partly for reasons of secrecy. Early in 1852 the meetings were moved to premises in Crown Street and were held on Wednesdays, because of suspicions aroused by the appearance in London Communist League circles of Hirsch, a shop assistant, who later turned out to be a police spy (see present edition, Vol. 11, p. 426).—521

[533] The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, in a conversation with the French Ambassador in London shortly after the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 in France, approved of Louis Bonaparte's usurpation. He did this without consulting the other members of the Whig Ministry, which led to his dismissal. The British Government was nevertheless the first to recognise the Bonapartist regime.—521

[544] Unlike the supporters of 'moral force' in the Chartist movement (see Note 339), O'Connor called in his speeches not only for peaceful means of struggle but for the use of 'physical force' as well.— 534

[545] Presumably an allusion to a resolution adopted by the Chartist Convention in 1839 confirming the people's right to support their demands by force of arms. But the Convention showed inconsistency and lack of determination by failing to organise the masses for energetic action when the Chartist petition was rejected by Parliament on 12 July.— 534

[547] Committee was being formed Marx and Engels intended to restr

[556] Peter Röser, a member of the Communist League Central Authority in Cologne, was sentenced to six years' imprisonment at the Cologne communist trial in November 1852. From December 1853 to February 1854 he was in prison first in Berlin and then in Stettin. Hoping to ease his lot he gave written evidence, which survived in the Prussian police archives, concerning mainly the Communist League activity and the Cologne communities' contacts with Marx and other leaders in London. In particular, he quoted from memory some letters Marx sent to Cologne, which are not extant. Some of the information he gave was inexact, perhaps owing partly to the fact that he himself was not well informed and partly to a deliberate attempt on his part to give a more moderate impression of the Communist League's activity. So he gave an oversimplified account of Marx's idea about the stages of transition to communism, as though Marx reduced the whole process of revolutionary-transformation passing through various stages merely to education. Contrary to Röser's assertion, the Cologne community of the Communist League already existed before it received Marx's letter early in 1850 suggesting that organisational activity in the Rhine Province should be intensified. Schramm was slightly and not seriously wounded in the duel with Willich, and seconds from both parties were present. Despite these and some other inaccuracies, Röser's evidence on the whole presents an objective picture of the state of affairs in the Communist League at the time and throws additional light on the struggle by Marx and his associates against the sectarian adventurists.—550